Back to Main Page of Hypertext Poem
Kids are Depressed, Too
Kids Given Drugs for Depression

Women, like others who are silenced, forced to follow roles that do not fit, often respond with depression. Depression is a condition all around us. We are feeding Prozac to children. Never mind all the articles and books out on it. Just think about what this epidemic of depression says sociologically about the society, the community in which we live. John Darwell tried to tell the story of depression through images. That's partly because we don't have words that do an adequate job of expressing it. When I first put A Black Dog Came Calling on the site, I said:

"All the images are dark. Can you imagine the telling of depression with lighter colors? What might it look like? I once had an art teacher named Alex. I was painting diligently and blissfully away when another student asked him "Where does she get all those colors from?" And he answered, not as gently as I might have wished, for he was old and had lost a little of his patience: "From her soul." Is the soul depressed? Does depression change the colors our nervous system registers? When I'm "depressed" I tend to do caricature drawings with figurative representation of the trigger that depressed me. But my colors remain bright. Does that mean that my husband is right? That I just can't understand depression? That little blob on the Zoloft ad isn't dark. The ad itself is cheerful, with a little blue bird, and other happy blobs trying to cheer him up. Does this mean that the people that did the ad don't understand depression anymore than I do? Or is there a continuum of depression, like the continuum of engagement with the exterior world (interpassivity v. interactivity)? There is much for us to explore here."

Back to Main Page of Hypertext Poem
Kids are Depressed, Too
Kids Given Drugs for Depression